minutes on two other days. WEEK TUESDAY SPEED THURSDAY TEMPO SATURDAY LONG 1 8 x 400m 3 miles 10 miles 2 4 x 1200m 5 miles 12 miles 3 6 x 800m 7 miles 13 miles 4 3 x 1600m 3

was already a marathon runner, and most of my runs were long and slow. My cross-country conqueror took a different tack. He focused on hard 1,200m intervals, subjecting his muscles to the kind of stress he’d face in competition. At times he also ran 400m

a 1:48 and regularly hit 1:50. At the bottom of the hill, do several sprint repetitions, varying between 50m and 400m. Says Lydiard: "These sprint repetitions begin the development of your capacity to exercise anaerobically." After six weeks of hill

temperatures that dropped to well below zero, and last spring added speedwork to his routine. By May, he was running long runs of two hours 40 minutes, doing six 400m repetitions in 1:45, and had set his sights on a first marathon.A programme can’t get any